Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:20
Yeah, no, thanks for sharing that. So I’m going to formally introduce you in a second. First, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways. An easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast with strategy, accountability, and full execution. Number two, an easy button for your company’s gifting. So staying top of mind could be clients, partners, prospects, and even staff from a cultural perspective. Just send us the addresses. We do everything else. We, you know, might call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to help people build amazing relationships. And, you know, that’s really the number one thing in my life. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships.
And I found no better way to profile the people in companies I admire on the podcast and send them sweet treats in the mail. So you can check out Rise25.com to learn more.
I’m excited to formally introduce Mike Collins. He’s been involved in almost every, you know, facet of venturing from angel investing to venture capital, new business product launches, and innovation consulting. He is the CEO of Alumni Ventures and launched a really first alumni fund, Green D Ventures, where he oversaw the portfolio as Managing Partner, and is now Managing Partner Emeritus. But he’s a serial entrepreneur, so he’s started multiple companies, Kid Galaxy, Big Idea Group, RDM, many more, and you know, the most. You know what’s left out. And the most impressive part about your bio, Mike, is I don’t know if you know what I’m gonna say here, but.
Mike Collins: 07:54
I think I know what.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:54
You’re. Okay.
Mike Collins: 07:55
We’ll see. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:58
He guarded Michael Jordan.
Mike Collins: 08:00
That was right.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:01
Which. Yeah. Okay. You know, I’m from Chicago, so you know, and I actually had Ben Jackson on the podcast, who was one of my best friends growing up in high school, who was Phil Jackson’s son. So, you know, Phil was part of that epic Bulls era in the 90s, going to some of those games. So what did you learn from guarding Michael Jordan?
Mike Collins: 08:28
Humility? No, I mean, this was a case of, you know, I was at Dartmouth, and I was on the basketball team. And, you know, they scheduled North Carolina, and I think it was 1983. And, you know, it wasn’t just Jordan; it was Kenny Smith.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:50
And James Worthy was on that team.
Mike Collins: 08:52
Maybe, you know, Worthy had just graduated the year before. But it was Brad Daugherty, Matt Doherty, you know, they were like three.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:00
All NBA All-Stars.
Mike Collins: 09:02
NBA Kenny Smith. You know, it’s like three Hall of Famers, right? Sam Perkins, you know, the guy on the bench that were like Mr. Basketball, you know, and they come out in a one-three-one half-court press. And you know we lost by 48. What can I what what can I say?
But I do have a little video of me following Michael Jordan, which I claim was all ball. And yeah, it’s a, it’s a heck of a story. But again, it’s, you know, sports were great for me. We hire to this day a lot of athletes. I think athletes or people who run clubs in college or organizations, you know, have the discipline of going to practice every day and trying to get kind of 1% better. And I think that a lot of success in business is not the huge idea, but it’s the daily grind of incremental improvement.
And, you know, that’s what a lot of sports are beyond, you know, the cliches of teamwork and, you know, facing adversity. And but yeah, I mean, people who get to the highest level of anything have to like the process and have to kind of get up every day, and it’s not work. And so I think, you know, I’m, I’m really privileged to this day that, you know, CEO of Alumni Ventures, I just love coming to work every day, and I get to meet interesting people. I’m working on things that I really believe in, that make the world a better place. I surround myself with motivated young people who are, you know, looking to learn and create a, a change in the world for the better. So yeah, those are some of the lessons for me of sports in general.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:08
What I love about sports.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:10
Mike, is really, you know, failure, like even in a given five minutes, right? Especially in basketball and baseball. I played baseball growing up, actually, I looked at going to Dartmouth for baseball. But you know, the Hall of Famers are successful three times out of ten. Right. And so its failure is expected part of the game. And when I go and play pick-up basketball or whatever it is, like you’re not expected to make every shot. And that really goes a lot with VC, with venture capital. And so I’d love to talk to you about that expectation. I mean, VC is an asset class, but the expectation of what that looks like from a failure perspective.
Mike Collins: 11:51
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a great example, Jeremy, which is a good VC. If, if, if, if we bat 250, you know, we’re crushing it. So in a typical venture portfolio, ten companies, five of them will go to zero, you know, and 2 or 3 of them will do, okay, lose a little money, make a little money, but maybe 1 or 2 make all the difference in the world. So, you know, VC is you have to have a short memory, like a good defensive back for the Bears. And you, you really focus on the winners. And most venture capitalists, when they look back on their career, it’s the home runs they did. And the thing that bothers you is the home runs you missed. And it’s not the ones that you invested in, and it just didn’t work out. You were too early, or something wasn’t quite right. But you know, it’s all about what can go right. And so much of so much of, I think, kind of traditional investing is analyzing what could go wrong. And there’s a lot of there’s a lot of clicks right now on being, you know, what can go wrong? How can we view this as kind of the end times and very much negative gets you clicks, you know, venture capital is for tech optimists, and what can go right?
You know, in venture capital, you can lose one times your money, but you can also. But that’s the limit, right? But you can also make 20, 50, 500 times your money if you get it right. So it’s like it’s much more of a power law. It’s much more about those handful of examples. And this includes, by the way, this isn’t just venture capital, you know, people that really study some of the great public stock investors like Warren Buffett. If you really look at he makes a lot of mistakes, too. And his returns have really been a small minority of his investments, which have really driven a lot of his returns. And that, in the other kind of timeless lesson, is the power of compounding, right? You know, live to be 95 and keep investing all along the way. And, you know, even if you’re only okay, you’re going to do pretty well.
You know, it’s the, it’s the discipline. If he’s just been really disciplined, really good for a long, long time. And venture capital is like that, too. It’s, you know, we invest in entrepreneurs who are doing hard things that can take a long time with a huge failure rate. And, you know, even companies, you know, you take one of the great companies in the world today, Nvidia, you know, Jensen spent his first decade doing video cards. And, you know, he will tell you how many times he was like waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat, wondering if he’s going to make payroll. And, you know, now it’s a multi-trillion dollar company because he, you know, stuck with it, got a little better every day, saw an opportunity and seized it. And you know, now he’s in the White House and you know, a multi-billionaire. So that’s how it works.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:28
We’ll talk about what’s misunderstood about venture capital. But I wanted to talk. You hit on something. We remember our misses, right? What? What are some of yours or the. The fun that you’re like, I can’t believe we passed on this.
Mike Collins: 15:43
No, I mean, it’s like, do you want me to? I could rattle off all the companies that we missed out on, including. Oh, you know, just it just it Alumni Ventures in my tenure, you know, we’re in SpaceX, but we got in late. We’re not in, we’re not in OpenAI. You know, we’re not in Anthropic. That bothers me. You know, this is a darn good portfolio. And again, if you go to kind of the A B 100, which we list on our website, you know, there are 100 companies that we think are, you know, changing the world and pretty fantastic. You know, a couple of them, you know, have, you know, recently gone public? Xanadu is on this list, a kind of quantum computing company. You know, a couple of our companies just filed their S1. So we’re super proud of our portfolio. But yeah, I mean, you miss them and it, it bothers you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:51
If people are listening to the audio, there is a video portion of this that we are on. You can go to av.vc. I’m looking at, you know, I pulled up the portfolio. You have OURA, which I, I have you know, I’m a ring, Sleeper, Lambda. There’s, there’s a bunch on here. And then I also pulled up under the blog you meet-the-av-100, which is what you were referring to. So you can go on there. And I know you have to come out with this like every year. This is a this is this year, but you can go on for the current year. What? On here. I don’t know if there’s one that you’re most proud of.
Mike Collins: 17:32
Well, I think it’s one of our first investments on on that we made when we were just a handful of people, which is a company called Sleeper and Sleeper, you know, is now one of the leading kind of fantasy sports apps, which, you know, is into the just enormous amount of people that, you know, create fantasy football, you know, leagues, whatever, just, you know, very, very popular. And, you know, it was, I think we first invested in the company and maybe 2015, 2016, you know, just a handful of people getting it going. No one was really interested in the space at that time. And, you know, there was a really strong connection that we had through one of our affinity groups, Dartmouth. So I was a Dartmouth grad with very strong connections to Sleeper through Dartmouth. And yeah, I mean, and we were there well before Andreessen, General Catalyst, you know, Andreessen led their rounds, and the company’s crushing it, and yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:58
What was it about Sleeper?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:59
What stuck out to you and the team about it?
Mike Collins: 19:06
We thought this was earlier.
Mike Collins: 19:08
The investment, the more you’re betting on the people. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s no financials. There’s very little traction at the end of the day. Is it a do you think that this is a big opportunity? And as a sports guy, you know, I could see that, you know, fantasy sports was coming. I could see gambling sports betting, which had always existed, were going to happen eventually. And but the but the bet was I bet on the team that they were going to, they were going to be the winners. They were going to figure it out. They were very passionate, technically super strong. And yeah, we put our chips behind the team, which is really often the case that, you know, if you try to apply too much like MBA brain and too much Wall Street. There’s, there’s, there’s too many variables. It’s too two. The future and how things unfold are too uncertain. But great entrepreneurs kind of find their way through all of that. So I fall in the camp of you bet on the people.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:34
Talk about when it was three people in a room. Because, especially with those you mentioned in the early bets out of ten, right, five could go to zero. Right. And so if the first two go to zero, then I mean, as you, I guess you rave enough, raise enough funds, or you’re not just getting to, but talk about when it started, what it looked like at three people in a room.
Mike Collins: 20:55
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it’s one thing that you really talked a little bit about, like, what is one of the misconceptions about venture capital, which is that it’s risky and it’s definitely risky for the entrepreneur. They’re going to invest 5 or 10 of their lives, and they’re, you know, pretty much putting all their eggs in one basket. And one of the reasons I think they deserve a lot of respect, they really do go out there and bet it all on themselves. But as an investor, if you’re doing venture capital correctly, as an individual, which is kind of our niche at Alumni Ventures, it’s you really want to think about a portfolio that has at least 100 companies in it. And that’s, if you have 100 companies in your venture portfolio and you have a strategy and have access to the tier one deals that are being led by the Andreessens and the Sequoia’s of the world, which is part of the other part of our strategy. I don’t think it’s any riskier, frankly, than, you know, many, many other asset classes.
It is just when you do a handful of deals, and those deals are the ones that happen to find their way onto your desk, which are probably not the best deals. There’s, there’s definitely adverse selection when it comes to, you know, why am I getting into this deal? If that is very much, then it becomes risky. So I think that’s one of the things I did when, you know, I set out to start this business, is one I felt was just really important, that technology and innovation and entrepreneurship are really the engine of the whole economy. And, you know, in the era of AI, I think it is going to change. Every career, every company, every society is going to change a lot over the next ten to 20 years because of technology. And, you know, I think we as citizens and individuals need to participate in that. And, you know, I set out to address that, that, you know, a heart surgeon in Des Moines can go to Vegas and, you know, put $100,000 on red but can invest in a portfolio of technology companies led by tier one VCs without, you know, a lot of work. So, you know, that’s what I really set out to do. So I had a very strong kind of personal mission in creating this company.
And we had to start, you know, small. So our first fund was just with a bunch of people I knew in the Dartmouth community, Green D Ventures. One of our early deals was Sleeper, Compass Therapeutics, you know, these are companies that have strong kind of Dartmouth connections. And then it’s just a matter of kind of, okay, I can see that that can work now, but that’s just because Dartmouth people are, you know, crazy about their school. That’ll never work anywhere else. And so, okay, we tried it at Harvard, Yale, Stanford. Oh, it works there, too. Okay. Now it’s, you know, if you are going to create a great new company, you are going to be viewed as crazy because you view the world differently than the conventional wisdom.
And the conventional wisdom of venture capital has always been. Why would you bother with individual investors who are writing ten, 25, $50,000 checks? Why don’t you just go out and raise, you know, 2500, $200 million from big institutions? And so, you know, everybody else zigs and we zag. We view our community, which is now 25,000 investors and syndicate members, as a feature and not a bug. And, you know, we’re now in our second decade building that network globally. We just opened an office in London and in Tokyo. We just announced this week a $100 million fund. We’ve had our first closing with the Japan-US bridge fund. So, you know, we still feel that we’re a startup.
Our next decade is taking that network, that connection, and making it a global one. So, you know, my, my, my dream of the business is, you know, there’s a startup in Israel, and we get involved in the pre-seed round, and they want to raise their funding in Silicon Valley, we can help make introductions. They want to meet some of our other co-founders. We have 1500 portfolio companies. They want introductions to potential customers in Korea, and in Japan, and in Scandinavia, Europe, and the Middle East. And we have connections there as well. So we’re very much about what we can do; we can all do better together as a network and a community, trying to create great new companies, innovate, support entrepreneurs, and trying to put a ding in the universe.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:32
So it sounds like I mean, like what some people see as a disadvantage, like why go after someone who’s going to give you 10,000, 20,000, whatever. You’ve made that into an advantage of, well, now we have a broader network of people to serve the companies. What are there any other things that people say? You know, this is a disadvantage for most, but for you, it’s an advantage.
Mike Collins: 26:53
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s I think it’s about dealing with. Being a co-investor. Right. So a lot of people would say, Oh, you’re just. You’re just a co-investor and, you know, the lead investor who’s going on the board and leading the rounds of financing and ringing the bell when they go public. Is, you know, you’re missing out. And, and, you know, my life experience has said great companies are built by great entrepreneurial teams. And VCs greatly overemphasize their contribution. And not that a good board is not really important to a company. But, you know, we were talking about baseball and the concept of wins above replacement, right?
You know, the difference between a VC and a good independent board member, I don’t think is all that great. And, you know, the real value creation of a venture capitalist is really, you know, identifying the company early and providing some capital and going along for the ride.
And so, you know, there definitely is a strong correlation between the best companies and the very best VCs. You know, you had your guests from Khosla. I think we’ve probably done 60 deals with Khosla where they’re leading or co-leading, and we’re a small co-investor in the round. I greatly respect the role of lead investors. They’re necessary, but that’s not the role we play. We play the role of. We’re like a favorite uncle. We. We leave you alone. But if you need help, we’re going to be super helpful to you in any way we can, mostly because of the power of our community and network. And so entrepreneurs respect that. They like us. We have a great reputation for being disproportionately helpful. I got a Slack this morning from one of our teammates.
One of our portfolio companies just wrote us this amazing note, offering to be like, oh, by the way, if any other entrepreneur wants to know what you guys are like to work with, put them in touch with me. That’s so nice to hear. Literally someone posted that an hour ago. So we know our lane. We do what we do really, really well. But a lot of people viewed that as kind of, you know, second-class citizen. But, you know, we don’t need the ego, we don’t need the, you know, we just try to add value. We try to, you know, do right by our portfolio companies, do right by our investors. But it also creates an advantage for us because we can do many more deals. So, you know, we have, for example, in the space and aerospace vertical, you know, we’re in 15 or 20 really amazing companies. Some of them have kind of some overlapping businesses. And if we were on the boards and we were lead investors, we couldn’t have such a large space portfolio.
There is also a lot of signaling that goes on with lead investors. So you, you, there are many, many times as a venture capitalist where I saw investors really for either personal career reasons or for, you know, the fund was raising money. So they really just didn’t want to write off the investment, you know, really make kind of decisions that weren’t in the best interest of either their investors or their company. Because they’re the lead. Because if the lead kind of doesn’t support the company, you know, it’s not going to happen. But as a really small co-investor, our ability to be objective and just kind of call balls and strikes. You know, I think it keeps us much more objective. We don’t, we’re not so close that we fall in love. You know, a great entrepreneur is going to be a great salesperson. And they, the real good ones, create almost as if called the reality distortion field around their vision of the future. And that is amazing and allows them to do things that change the world.
But you can get sucked into that and lose perspective and by, by, by being close to the company, being close to the entrepreneur, but not really just totally immersed in the air. I think we can make more objective decisions. So our ability to kind of put more money to work in companies that really are getting traction, to kind of back off companies that are just not there. And frankly, even sometimes taking some chips off the table in companies that we’ve been around a while. I think it makes us more objective. So getting to the, to, to the point of, you know, our co-investment strategy, which a lot of people would view as kind of a disadvantage, I actually think is an advantage for us.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:39
Well, Mike, I have a new tagline for your site, and you have your venture investing partner, but it should be maybe your favorite uncle. We give you money and leave you alone. Yeah. But I want, I want, I do want to talk about the Japan US Bridge Fund. But before we get into that, just a little bit of how it works right now. I know before, if we’re looking at the page here, right, people can get in for as little as 10,000. There’s a different fund overview. There are different investments with your people. But I imagine, I don’t know if I went to Wisconsin, I could still be like, okay, I want to be in the UChicago alumni. How does it work if someone’s like, I want to get involved, where do they come in?
Mike Collins: 33:23
Yeah. So first of all, the best thing to do is just get on the phone with one of us and talk through because everybody’s different where they are in their journey. How much do they know about this asset class? There’s a really important decision, which is, do you want to pick individual deals yourself, or do you want to let us pick them for you? We have some customers, maybe a quarter, who want to pick every deal themselves. And so they join our syndicate. We show them a deal or two a month, and they invest that way. We have other people who say, I get the fact that I should have a large diversified portfolio. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the expertise. I just want to go into one of your diversified portfolios, whether that’s one of our alumni fund portfolios or whether that’s one of our focus fund portfolios around deep tech, what have you.
It’s like public stocks. We have, we have basically the equivalent of index funds, which are very diversified. And we have things that are around affinities. Whether I want to invest with people I went to school with or I think those Stanford Harvard guys get really good deal access. I want to go into their funds, or I want to pick deals one at a time myself. We have a solution for you, and we’re happy to kind of talk through what is best for you. I would say most of our investors do a combination of diversified funds just so they know that they’ve got this asset class covered, but they like to pick some individual deals as well because it’s fun and interesting and it really kind of sharpens their investing blade. We also have investing clubs. So for people who, you know, want to pick their own deals, want to see deals kind of one at a time, but they really want to participate in a half hour or one hour deal discussion.
We’ve got lots of clubs where people get on a Zoom call and look at deals one at a time with a, and we share our due diligence. We have our sponsors talk about what we like about the deal, what the risks are. You know, again, we’re we’re there for you. And. It’s a very personal decision on how you want to do it, just like it is with people in their public stocks. Some people just, hey, put me in the S&P. I’m good. And other people like to kind of pick individual deals to put into their, you know, fidelity account. But most people want to do a bit of a blend. And so that’s what most of our people do.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:07
Yeah, that’s super interesting. And the Japan-US Bridge Fund, how does that work?
Mike Collins: 36:15
Yeah. So this is a fund that was really designed for institutional investors. And so we have several of the large Japanese colleges and universities, and several large corporations in Japan. Japan is actually at a very interesting place right now, which is a tremendous STEM workforce, great work ethic. Great economy, lots of cash. But it has. It’s produced seven unicorns, which is, you know, a small city block around San Francisco, you know, kind of thing. So, you know, I’m over there and, you know, they definitely recognize that they want to control more of their tech stack, that for too long, they’ve been reliant on other countries, other technologies. And their economy has been pretty flattish for the last 20 or 30 years. Right? So they’re really looking hard at how they can build more of what has been built in the United States.
And so the idea which we created with our Japanese partners was a U.S. Japan Bridge Fund. So we have many portfolio companies that want to do business in that part of the world. So part of the fund will be to take great U.S. tech companies and help them go into Japan. At the same time, there are a there are an increasing number of very interesting early-stage Japanese startups. We just made an investment in a really interesting quantum computing startup in Japan. And, you know, they want to learn and have access to some of the things that, you know, we take for granted here in the United States tech ecosystem. So, you know, the Japan-US Bridge Fund is the first of many that we’re establishing.
We’re in the early process of doing the same thing in Korea and in the Atlantic region, Scandinavia, the Middle East, Europe. But yeah, it’s the idea of it’s kind of counters this, we’re all isolated, and we need to kind of, you know, do everything ourselves. You know, that’s not possible, frankly, and frankly, not the kind of world I want to be part of. So I do think there are great entrepreneurs everywhere that we can all learn from each other. We can all innovate. Competition is good. But, you know, America has been singular in its ability to create great new technology companies. I mean, if you just take three companies, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, all of which could be public in the next, you know, 12, 18 months, I would bet that they will have a combined market cap of those three companies will exceed the entire GDP of Japan, which has had amazing companies. Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi, NEC, KDdI, you know, etc.
Yeah. I mean, it’s like the value creation. And that’s just three companies. There are dozens of others that have been that didn’t exist when I went to college that have changed the world. And so I think this is something that is singular to the United States, something that is an enormous value. And, you know, I was talking to teammates in London yesterday, and it’s like, you know, one thing, you get over there, and you go, you do appreciate the density of amazing startups we have in this country. And whether that be in energy, whether that be in health tech, whether that be an AI, a robotics, you know, and this is a difference. I’ve seen Jeremy since when I started, when I started out as a kind of just a junior cold calling VC. You know, there was innovation, a few pockets of the economy, but there are whole areas that we’re just not touching. Now it’s everywhere. And, you know, even something that is fairly recent for Silicon Valley to go after, which is like defense tech, you know, for a long, long time, Silicon Valley did not invest in, you know, the defense industry, right?
And it’s like, oh, that’s the, that’s the purview of the prime contractors, and selling to the government’s not where we want to be. And they’re too slow and bureaucratic. And, you know, companies like Palantir and Anduril and others kind of, you know, broke the seal on that. And now most of the great, you know, defense tech companies are coming from the private sector. And, and Silicon Valley is, you know, wakes up and, you know, as you travel the world and you’re meeting with companies and governments and it’s like, oh, yeah, we, we, we see the changing nature of, you know, sovereignty and its defense tech and its who, you know, its access to AI and its access to logistics and raw materials and, you know, cyber security. And it’s like, and if we aren’t good at that, you know, our sovereignty as a nation and as a society is very much at risk. So, you know, it’s kind of being forced by necessity. But, you know, we have a lot to offer the world as Americans in that regard.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:39
Mike, I have one last question. First of all, thanks for sharing your journey. And I just want to encourage people to check out the website here: av.vc. And specifically, I love navigating the portfolio page. I mean, you could look at the alumni ventures portfolio. You can search by fund, you can search by stage, sector, or geography. And they have some really also some great learnings and webinars and other things. So you can check out the learn page as well if you want to get more information. My last question is just about resources, Mike, some of your favorite resources. It could be podcasts, it could be books, it could be what you’ve learned from now and throughout your years that’s helped you and your business journey?
Mike Collins: 43:26
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s just, there’s just a tremendous number of great podcasts and Reddits and Substacks, and I actually have kind of my 100 greatest hits. And I’ll, we’ll put those in the show notes, and people can check out kind of, you know, my Rolling Stone top 100, which is a combination
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:52
Is it on the website somewhere, or where is it?
Mike Collins: 43:54
No, I actually only send that to kind of friends and colleagues. I don’t want to be too presumptuous, but you asked the question, so I’ll give you a copy of the PDF of that and your listeners, and hopefully they will enjoy it. And I would mention that, you know, we do have a really strong offering when it comes to education. It’s part of our mission. Baby Academy includes we have a bunch of videos. We have, we have regular webinars and blogs where we go through topics. Some of these things, like we’ll take a deal that we recently did and just kind of go through our scoring of it and what we liked. We have clubs that are, you know, very much designed for, you know, kind of evaluating deals. And, you know, we’re launching this summer, actually, a kind of a half-day, no-cost workshop where people can come in and, in half a day, kind of get a huge data dump on what VC is, how it works.
How do you construct a portfolio? What are the things to think about? How, how do you ask good questions? What do you want to avoid? I think I think those things people will find are kind of common sense, but, you know, hard to do. And so, you know, we believe a lot in bringing more people into this asset class and explaining how it works. Some of the, you know, like a lot of things, there’s kind of insider language, you know, you know, there’s even a pretty significant difference between venture capital and private equity. What’s the difference? And we go through all of that. And those things are all free and would encourage people to come to our website, hit the learn button. Next month, we’re actually launching this new academy, which is free for you, you know, which has webinars in it and kind of in real-life events. So, encourage people to get more educated.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:09
What’s one of the top 100 that you can? What’s one out of that? Your Rolling Stone’s top 100?
Mike Collins: 46:15
Yeah, I mean, I, I, The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen is kind of a classic. I think Zero To One is another great one. Lean Startup is great. You know, there’s a, there’s, There’s a lot of good stuff. Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, puts out a lot of really great blogs and writings. They do a great job with some of their content as well. Yeah, that’s the beauty of today, right? There’s a lot of good stuff. In fact, you can just go, go ask ChatGPT or Claude to kind of give you a brief on some subject matter, and they do a great job. So that’s a good tool as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:58
Mike. I would be the first one to thank you. Everyone, check out av.vc to learn more. Mike, thanks so much.
Mike Collins: 47:06
Excellent, Jeremy. Thank you.
